Effective Delay Control in Online Network Coding

Motivated by streaming applications with stringent delay constraints, we consider the design of online network coding algorithms with timely delivery guarantees. Assuming that the sender is providing the same data to multiple receivers over independent packet erasure channels, we focus on the case of perfect feedback and heterogeneous erasure probabilities. Based on a general analytical framework for evaluating the decoding delay, we show that existing ARQ schemes fail to ensure that receivers with weak channels are able to recover from packet losses within reasonable time. To overcome this problem, we re-define the encoding rules in order to break the chains of linear combinations that cannot be decoded after one of the packets is lost. Our results show that sending uncoded packets at key times ensures that all the receivers are able to meet specific delay requirements with very high probability.Comment: 9 pages, IEEE Infocom 200

On the role of feedback in network coding

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-149).Network coding has emerged as a new approach to operating communication networks, with a promise of improved efficiency in the form of higher throughput, especially in lossy conditions. In order to realize this promise in practice, the interfacing of network coding with existing network protocols must be understood well. Most current protocols make use of feedback in the form of acknowledgments (ACKs) for reliability, rate control and/or delay control. In this work, we propose a way to incorporate network coding within such a feedback-based framework, and study the various benefits of using feedback in a network coded system. More specifically, we propose a mechanism that provides a clean interface between network coding and TCP with only minor changes to the protocol stack, thereby allowing incremental deployment. In our scheme, the source transmits random linear combinations of packets currently in the TCP congestion window. At the heart of our scheme is a new interpretation of ACKs - the receiver acknowledges every degree of freedom (i.e., a linear combination that reveals one unit of new information) even if it does not reveal an original packet immediately. Such ACKs enable a TCP-compatible sliding-window implementation of network coding. Thus, with feedback, network coding can be performed in a completely online manner, without the need for batches or generations. Our scheme has the nice feature that packet losses on the link can be essentially masked from the congestion control algorithm by adding enough redundancy in the encoding process.(cont.) This results in a novel and effective approach for congestion control over networks involving lossy links such as wireless links. Our scheme also allows intermediate nodes to perform re-encoding of the data packets. This in turn leads to a natural way of running TCP flows over networks that use multipath opportunistic routing along with network coding. We use the new type of ACKs to develop queue management algorithms for coded networks, which allow the queue size at nodes to track the true backlog in information with respect to the destination. We also propose feedback-based adaptive coding techniques that are aimed at reducing the decoding delay at the receivers. Different notions of decoding delay are considered, including an order-sensitive notion which assumes that packets are useful only when delivered in order. We study the asymptotic behavior of the expected queue size and delay, in the limit of heavy traffic.by Jay Kumar Sundararajan.Ph.D

Dynamic Rate Adaptation for Improved Throughput and Delay in Wireless Network Coded Broadcast

In this paper we provide theoretical and simulation-based study of the delivery delay performance of a number of existing throughput optimal coding schemes and use the results to design a new dynamic rate adaptation scheme that achieves improved overall throughput-delay performance. Under a baseline rate control scheme, the receivers' delay performance is examined. Based on their Markov states, the knowledge difference between the sender and receiver, three distinct methods for packet delivery are identified: zero state, leader state and coefficient-based delivery. We provide analyses of each of these and show that, in many cases, zero state delivery alone presents a tractable approximation of the expected packet delivery behaviour. Interestingly, while coefficient-based delivery has so far been treated as a secondary effect in the literature, we find that the choice of coefficients is extremely important in determining the delay, and a well chosen encoding scheme can, in fact, contribute a significant improvement to the delivery delay. Based on our delivery delay model, we develop a dynamic rate adaptation scheme which uses performance prediction models to determine the sender transmission rate. Surprisingly, taking this approach leads us to the simple conclusion that the sender should regulate its addition rate based on the total number of undelivered packets stored at the receivers. We show that despite its simplicity, our proposed dynamic rate adaptation scheme results in noticeably improved throughput-delay performance over existing schemes in the literature.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figure